... I think a large enough economic majority will make the current miners come along in a UASF. The miners have no interest in mining worthless coins after all.

Sturle, I am not an expert cryptocurrency programmer, but on the topic of business I feel qualified to comment: as a KnC exec said during their company's dying swan song, it's unlikely the Chinese mining operations would be able to operate at their margins unless the Chinese miners receive virtually unlimited funding from a state-level entity (e.g. the government of China or perhaps the PBoC).

I doubt that, but it is a different issue. I don't think we should base an altcoin on a conspiracy theory.

In my view, the best way to remove Bitmain and other tyrants (for a year or two) is to have the full PoW change, rather than having 50% SHA-256 and 50% a new algorithm.

My point is that you can't change the POW in Bitcoin. You can make a new coin with a different POW, and you can even carry over all the coins fro Bitcoin in a genesis block or whatever, and fix everything else which is wrong in Bitcoin in the same go, but you can't change the POW agorithm. It is impossible. It will become a new coin either you want to or not, It is just as stupid as those scammers who pretend it is possible to increase the blocksize in Bitcoin. It will become a new coin either you want to or not.

The only way to upgrade the POW while keeping Bitcoin Bitcoin, is to add an extra POW as a soft fork.

I see there are mostly newbies posting in this thread. Perhaps you should take some time to educate yourself about how bitocoin and blockchains work.

Sjå https://bitmynt.no for veksling av bitcoin mot norske kroner. Trygt, billig, raskt og enkelt sidan 2010.I buy with EUR and other currencies at a fair market price when you want to sell. See http://bitmynt.no/eurprice.plWarning: "Bitcoin" XT, Classic, Unlimited and the likes are scams. Don't use them, and don't listen to their shills.

What do you guys think of Bram Cohens Proof of Space/Proof of Time?I agree with him that PoW is a waste of energy, however all the experts say everything else is a joke and won't work. (Proof of Stake etc...)So I guess our only option is to use PoW to secure the blockchain. But then again I'm no expert so I don't know if Proof of Space/Proof of Time is feasible or not.

LOL. Core has offially jumped off the deep end. This proposal is insanity.

Can't win the vote by means that were established since 2009, and for good reasons (The Byzantine Generals Problem) - No Problem! Let's just change the way voting works.

You guys just proved that YOU are the ones trying to take control over Bitcoin. YOU are the ones trying to centralize it. You should be ashamed of yourselves for this blatant attempt to hijack the blockchain.

Go fuck yourselves, you dimwitted fanatics. But what did I even expect from people like luke-jr that officially stated that the Sun orbits around the Earth, and not vice versa? It's like talking to someone that's never even been to a school before.

But hey, be my guest, have fun with your centralized altcoin controlled by Blockstream. Great choice!

FYI: There aren't even any real developers contributing to this proposal - because they are not insane. Nobody with half a brain would put his name under this stinking turd of mental diarrhea. This is merely a marketing ploy to stir up shit. Luke-jr is not a developer, and he is far from being renowned. He's a religious fanatic that's paid to spread propaganda in Core's bitcoin reddit. I can provide you some of his quotes if you're interested. In short, he said that the death sentence is justified, that slavery is not immoral, that gays should not be allowed to marry, that the Sun orbits around the Earth, that masturbation and any kind of sexual relation not leading to procreation is a sin, and many more nonsensical statements like these.

My point is that you can't change the POW in Bitcoin. You can make a new coin with a different POW, and you can even carry over all the coins fro Bitcoin in a genesis block or whatever, and fix everything else which is wrong in Bitcoin in the same go, but you can't change the POW agorithm. It is impossible. It will become a new coin either you want to or not, It is just as stupid as those scammers who pretend it is possible to increase the blocksize in Bitcoin. It will become a new coin either you want to or not.

The only way to upgrade the POW while keeping Bitcoin Bitcoin, is to add an extra POW as a soft fork.

I see there are mostly newbies posting in this thread. Perhaps you should take some time to educate yourself about how bitocoin and blockchains work.

The number of mind numbingly unaware posts here and on reddit has become ridiculous over the last week. I mean there are people literally suggesting forking to a different PoW algorithm while calling Bitcoin Unlimited the altcoin if it hard forks, etc. If you're the coin that's forking to a different algorithm entirely and also changing the way transactions are sent then how can you argue that the other coin is the altcoin?

Adding an extra PoW might genuinely help to regain some of the distributed nature of early Bitcoin, but I think that long term this will be just a bandaid again. Someone somewhere will likely work on an ASIC that's better for any new algorithm and then in a few years we'll again be very centralized.

The number of mind numbingly unaware posts here and on reddit has become ridiculous over the last week. I mean there are people literally suggesting forking to a different PoW algorithm while calling Bitcoin Unlimited the altcoin if it hard forks, etc. If you're the coin that's forking to a different algorithm entirely and also changing the way transactions are sent then how can you argue that the other coin is the altcoin?

testerx, I believe what is being discussed here is if bitmain decides to attack the bitcoin blockchain. If they have 51% of the hashing power (and there's no reason to think they don't) they can stop all transactions that they don't want. In this likelihood, it will be very good to have an alternate PoW available that can be introduced as an emergency fork.

I don't think anyone doubts that this just kicks the can down the road in its current implementation. It is, however, important that we, the users, protect bitcoin from this hostile take-over attempt. Maybe if they see the gun cocked at their heads they'll rethink it. They better.

Would it be possible to have multiple PoW's, where the difficulty reset of each PoW algorithm was dependent upon how quickly they resolved the next block?

Each node has the logic to validate multiple PoW blocks. At the difficulty reset, the timing for each PoW is calculated, and the difficulty for each PoW is reset based upon how quickly they found blocks for that PoW. Then, you could introduce other PoW's into the system without negatively affecting (at least too much) existing miners of a specific PoW. You could soft-fork in a new PoW (like keccak?) which already has miners using it. I suppose you could also soft-fork specific miners out. What are the chances of a single miner being proficient in all algorithms? Not high I imagine.

How to kill million-dollar industry in one commit (c)LukeJRNever gonna happen. He can create just another altcoin.Also, it is old stuff in his own repo "luke-jr committed on 16 Jan 2016", he planned it on beginning 2016 Apr 14Yet another FUD to play on bitcoin value?

No joke as far as I'm concerned. We have to have a plan in place in case bitmain attacks the network when they don't get their way. To not have a plan when someone is repeatedly threatening you isn't a good way to manage risk. I hope it isn't required. Only bitmain can answer the question about whether it is required or not.

How to kill million-dollar industry in one commit (c)LukeJRNever gonna happen. He can create just another altcoin.Also, it is old stuff in his own repo "luke-jr committed on 16 Jan 2016", he planned it on beginning 2016 Apr 14Yet another FUD to play on bitcoin value?

This is decidedly not about luke-jr, or 'Core' (as some have suggested) or Jihan Wu.

Others were discussing change of POW at the same time as that github commit:

So finally i had the answer to my question in the first page of the thread, i would like to ask for all the Advantages/Inconvenients who could result from an algorythm change, i am aware of bitmain's attempt, and if ViaBtc is really a child of Bitmain, they will own more then 51% of the network.

If the algorythm change can really bring protection against this situation, then i am totally for algo change. yet i want to know what are the expected effects on the network, users, markets. I don't want bitcoin to turn to BU, both philosophies are different, and opposing at some points.

The recent events should really get every user to think about what would happen if bitmain achieves the 51%+ network hashrate, and to the announcements in the twitter account of Jihan Wu.